


Misfiled

by JellyDishes, witchGender



Series: Cracked Foundations [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Angst and Romance, Angst with a Happy Ending, Autistic Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Deviates From Canon, Gen, M/M, Roleswap, Romance, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Suicide, jonmartin, neurodivergent character, see the notes for details
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-02-23 08:10:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23008402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JellyDishes/pseuds/JellyDishes, https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchGender/pseuds/witchGender
Summary: In September of 2016, a man named Jonathan Sims came to give a statement at the Magnus Institute.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Series: Cracked Foundations [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1796284
Comments: 83
Kudos: 273





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter two features an offscreen suicide of an unrelated character, if that is something that would cause you distress
> 
> Know that you are stronger than you think, and every day you are here with us makes me proud
> 
> A link to international suicide hotlines: http://www.suicide.org/international-suicide-hotlines.html

In September of 2016, a man named Jonathan Sims came to give a statement at the Magnus Institute. He sat across from Martin, staring him up and down with dark eyes behind darker glasses. Martin could only look back with a vague, uncertain smile at this unanticipated scrutiny. Jon was small and lean, with brown skin gone paler from the weak autumn sun. He had long, salt and pepper hair that he kept impatiently pushing out of his eyes as he frowned at Martin. Or more precisely, his nose. He wasn’t quite making eye contact, his gaze darting away as soon as Martin tried to meet it with his own. Martin wondered if it was a nervous habit, the way he himself picked at everything. Including these statements, he supposed. 

Telling himself that there was no way forward but to start things himself, Martin cleared his throat. He politely ignored the way Jon twitched, almost like he’d been about to recoil before he stopped himself. “Statement of Jon-“

“Jonathan,” the man interrupted, pressing his lips into a thin line that put Martin in mind of a disapproving school teacher. He had to smother a laugh, guessing that Jonathan wouldn’t take that very well. 

“Jonathan Sims,” Martin corrected with what he hoped came across as an apologetic smile, “regarding…”

“No one ever calls me Jon,” the man went on. Where some people would have said something about only their friends calling them by a nickname, he only fell quiet for a moment. “I prefer Jonathan. It feels more proper. ‘Jon’ is overly familiar. I do not want or need that.”

“Yes, well…” Martin gave an automatic smile that was more than a bit awkward, unsure of how to take the quiet, brittle pride in the tilt of the man’s chin. “About what this is regarding…”

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. Regarding the...“ Jonathan almost seemed to flounder, searching for the right words to fit his experience. It wasn’t the first time Martin had seen it, and he waited patiently until Jonathan (somehow, though, he had to fight the urge to call him Jon in his head) started to speak again. “Regarding the increasingly strange events in my life since meeting Peter Lukas.”

“Recorded directly from subject,” Martin said in an odd tone, half hitched breath and half audible wince, “by uh, by Martin Blackwood. Archivist.”

Jonathan closed his eyes with an intent, focused expression, but did not speak. In fact, he was quiet for long enough that Martin almost prompted him, but just before he could, Jonathan opened his eyes. “It happened this past Saturday,” he said. “I work long hours bookkeeping, but I always make time to visit the library. Books have long been a source of… well, I suppose a sort of comfort to me, and even more so the library.”

He looked away then, narrowing his eyes in thought or at a memory, but Martin didn’t push him to continue speaking until he was ready. It was another five seconds before he was. “You don’t have to talk to anyone at a library. You don’t have to know what to say or how to say it, all of those little social intricacies that I’ve never managed half as well as books. The people in books, even the most vile, have their motivations plainly laid out for you to dissect and understand at your leisure but real people are… much harder to understand.” 

“Still, even knowing that, and knowing my…” His mouth twisted again in a smile that was rueful and lopsided, like he wasn’t used to making his mouth work that way, “unique talent for earning the ire of my peers, there is something to be said for being around people. Particularly in a library. There is no pressure to do those things I cannot. In a library, I can surround myself with the simple hush of conversations going on all around me, and know that I am safe. Libraries are… They are not just a repository of knowledge, but of civilization. That same impulse that drew early peoples to each other from their corners in the dark, it pulls people there now. There is anonymity in a library, while at the same time you can feel the weight of all of those eyes throughout the years, all of those minds reaching for that same starlight on a shelf.” There was a moment where Jonathan Sims smiled here where Martin couldn’t help but hold his breath. It felt like watching something rare and delicate unfold itself before his eyes. He wanted to commit it to memory almost as much as he wanted to ask Jonathan Sims to describe something else, everything.

“That was when I met him.” That brief, shining bit of magic snuffed out as easily as the next few syllables out of Jonathan Sims’ mouth. “Peter Lukas.” Jonathan’s eyes were far away, or he may have noticed the way Martin stiffened in his seat, instead going on to say, “I didn’t know him then. Or now, really, that is largely why I decided to come here, to you. He must be… There must be a record of this man, a way to catch him or prevent him from doing this again, learn why and how and…” 

Jonathan made a visible effort to stop himself and frowned. “In any case, I met a man named Peter Lukas, and he met me. The oddest thing was, I could have sworn before the grave of my mother that I had never met him before, but he knew me right off. Came right up to me with a smile and a clap on my back.” Another frown, and looking at his slight frame, Martin could just imagine how a clap must have knocked him forward. “I told him that I had no idea who he was, of course, but that didn’t seem to bother him in the least. ‘Imagine seeing you in a place like this!’ he said, in the strangest tone. He sounded… amused. ‘And here I thought I lost track of you! Should’ve checked here from the start. Just can’t seem to stop yourself from soaking up all the knowledge you can, can you, Jon?’”

Jonathan still wasn't paying complete attention to Martin, who had gone cold. If a man like Peter Lukas recognized Jonathan and thought that he was worth paying attention to… Jonathan Sims was in grave danger. The fact that he had survived that encounter, and how, was suddenly even more dire than it had been before. He leaned forward and clasped his hands on the table to keep them from shaking as Jonathan went on, “I brushed him off, of course. I hadn’t come to the library to be talked to by a stranger like he were an old friend I’d never had. I said something, some sort of excuse, but I still heard him speak from behind me before I got too far away to hear him. ‘Don’t get too lost in your research now, Jon!’”

Jonathan looked up Martin then with his brows bunched together. What he saw on Martin’s face seemed to give him momentary pause, but he seemed to choose not to say anything about it, just sigh. “I tried to put him from my mind. And for a while, I succeeded. I found a wonderful history of Scandanavian history and settled into my usual corner to read it. I, ah… I suppose I should explain myself here.” Jonathan said this with an expression that looked almost bashful. Martin hoped that his own hadn’t reacted too much with second-hand emotions, or so he convinced himself it was. “When I read, I get fully caught up in it. I become oblivious to the world outside of its pages. The number of times I was disciplined in school for missing the bell…” He shook his head. “The point is, I don’t know at what point things changed, only that I very gradually became aware that the low, comforting hum of conversation was gone. The library was wrapped in complete silence that was itself loud. It boomed in the corners, in my own heartbeat in my ears as I rose out of my nook and called out. Even then, though, I could feel that there was something… off, about it. And anyone who has ever kn-” He caught the next word on his tongue, and turned it into a shrug. “I am a, ah, inquisitive sort. I can’t let a problem or question go once I’ve discovered it. As much as I may wish to, sometimes,” he added in a quieter tone. 

“I told myself that I had simply missed the library closing around me, but even then there was this… knot, deep in my gut, as if I had swallowed one of those metal pellets fishermen sometimes use. It was cold, and heavy. I knew something was wrong, before I could see it. And there was. The library was, it was… You have to understand, I’ve had the library’s layout memorized for years, it simply isn’t that _big._ I should have been able to see halfway across the main room from the far end of the last stack, but instead, there was…” He moved his lips for a second before he could manage to say, “row upon row of books, there was no end to them. And not in neat lines, either, otherwise I should have… I should have been to _see…_ ”

His voice came out a rasp when he next spoke. “I, ah… I don’t know how long I wandered the stacks. A week, two? Even longer? I- I don’t know. It is impossible to keep track of time when the only clocks you can find don’t move, the only windows shrouded by a solid wall of fog that doesn’t move or fade except to grow still thicker, and every step you take only seems to bring you deeper and deeper into a place that shouldn’t have existed, shouldn’t have been-” He’d been talking faster and faster, his voice rising, before he cut himself off with a sharp noise. “I tried breaking them,” he said then, almost calmly. “The windows. First with chairs, then books, then my hands. Nothing worked. They were a wall in every sense of the word, and every bit as solid as those that have kept me…” He shook his head. “Kept me. Like a novelty, or a trinket. Something to dust off to show to company so they can coo over how _kind,_ how _generous_ you are for tolerating my presence. Then, once they are gone...” A shrug, as he sank back into his seat from the vibratingly stiff posture he’d had before. “It is back on the shelf. So believe me when I say that I am quite accustomed to keeping my own company, but this silence was so complete, so, so total, that I… I think I went a little mad.”

He looked at Martin, and Martin looked back at a face that was slack with weariness and something that made his own chest ache. “I don’t suppose I need to tell you about what can happen to the mind in isolation. Well, it happened. Hallucinations, delirium, depression… I became convinced I was dead. I wanted to be. Tried to be.” There ought to have been one of those pauses of his here so that Jonathan could collect himself, but there was not, and Martin found himself wishing for it as Jonathan went on to say, “I wish I could say it was stubbornness that kept me going, or that I had some grand plan or strategy. But the truth is... I was too afraid to give in. Every time I’ve given in to isolation before, my life became... so much worse. Isn’t that odd?” He laughed, and there was no humor in it. “Lost in a labyrinthine library, and all I could think about was my grandmother denying me again and again until I stopped asking.”

The tape recorder turned it's tape round and round in quiet circles as the silence stretched between them. Then Jonathan Sims struggled to create a smile from the wreckage of his expression. He couldn’t quite manage it. The result hung at an odd angle and looked more tired and strained than he thought Jonathan realized. It was painful to see, and probably worse to feel. Martin started to reach a hand out to him, to comfort him or tell him that he _wasn’t_ alone, but as soon as he did, Jonathan jerked back. It looked reflexive, a learned behavior. Martin’s hand hung there while Jonathan gave that painful smile again. “That's it, I suppose," Jon said stiffly. "Anticlimactic, but. After hours, days, years, the end was as abrupt as its start. I turned a corner that simply hadn't _been there_ before, and there was the front desk. I could have wept. Maybe I did." He looked close to it now. "I-“ His mouth worked for several seconds. He swallowed. “Is there more? Do you need more information?”

Martin was about to say no, that they had everything they needed and that the archive staff would be in touch if follow-ups were needed, but he couldn’t make himself look Jonathan Sims in the eye and say those words. Knowing that he would be sending him back out into an afternoon that may not have been foggy, but was just as wearying to travel alone. Instead, he nodded his head. “Yes, I think I would like you to fill out some additional forms if that’s alright? I’ll make some tea if you want, I’ve got a lovely peach…”

Jonathan visibly sagged in his chair with relief, if only because Martin was looking for it. “No thank you,” he said to the tea, and held up a battered box of cigarettes. “My addiction of choice is a tad more permanent. I’ll just be a moment. The exit is to the left, yes?”

Martin told him it was, then paused. Something compelled him to say, “Jonathan, we’ll help you. We’ll make it better.”

Jonathan didn’t turn back around, but there was something in the dip of one shoulder that hinted at a smile. “It will take a lot more than a tape recorder to convince me of that,” he said.

“It's a good thing I have tea then, eh?” Martin laughed, and it didn’t feel as forced as it might have.

“Sure,” Jonathan said, with what Martin was certain was a quiet laugh in his voice. Martin felt a little thrill well up in his chest as he pulled out some paper to take some of those notes on. Out of his peripheral vision, he saw Jonathan round the corner outside his office to the short stairs that led outside. The window beside it was damp with a fog that hadn’t been there an hour ago, and Martin shot to his feet with a harsh cry in his throat. He ran, stumbling in his haste. He rounded the corner just in time to see Jonathan turning to see him with a surprised look on his face, fog swirling around his feet like a cloak, just as the door slammed shut between them.

By the time he opened the door again, Jonathan was gone, and the fog with him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is an offscreen suicide of an unrelated character near the end of the chapter. It is treated respectfully, and with full knowledge of the seriousness of the topic 
> 
> Know that you are loved, and that your presence here matters.
> 
> A link to international suicide hotlines: http://www.suicide.org/international-suicide-hotlines.html

On the second of October 2016, a man walked into the archives of the Magnus Institute. This was unusual because most people tended to avoid the archives at any cost, but also because at no point had he been noticed walking through the entrance, or any of the doors in between. 

He stood before Martin’s desk for some seconds before the clearing of his throat finally caught Martin’s attention. He looked up into a face that was hard for him to place, though he felt like he should have been able to. He smiled on automatic and opened his mouth to ask what his business was in the archives, but the man spoke first. “Mister Blackwood,” he croaked in a tone that had the bottom of Martin’s stomach drop out and keep right on going, “I think I killed someone. I don’t know how or why, and if you try to call the police on me it won’t work. The police won’t be able to see me, they didn't when I tried to call the... the death in, they ruled it a _suicide,_ and _I know it isn’t._ ” He said all of that in a rush, the words tumbling out in a torrent, one word coming so fast upon the next that he was breathless and shaking by the time he was done.

“Okay,” Martin said just as quickly, patting the air in what he hoped was a reassuring way even as panic made his own heartbeat thrum in his ears. This man could be and probably was dangerous, and the knowledge closed chill fingers around his heart. Martin drew in a swift breath through his nose, and gave another, pained smile. His best bet was to keep him talking long enough for somebody else to come by, which would hopefully be soon. He reached for his tape recorder, which happened to be beside his phone. “Okay! It’s okay, it. Um. How about we start at the beginning? Make this an official statement, mister, ah…?”

The man’s face fell. He muttered something Martin couldn’t make out, but it didn’t sound particularly patient, or complimentary. His expression firmed as he thrust out his chin. “We don’t have _time_ for this,” he cut in just as Martin pressed record on the tape recorder. The machine immediately began to squeal in protest as the man’s face twisted. “I’ve been through all this before, and I don’t care to hear your version of it. You know something about Peter Lukas, and you are going to tell me what it is.”

Martin’s smile had gone stiff and trembling on his face. “Okay! Okay, so, you want to start with... with the. The ah. Murder?” 

The man’s frown deepened at the word ‘murder’ but he didn’t argue. He simply sighed and pinched at the bridge of his nose. “This isn’t going to get us anywhere,” he muttered just loud enough to be heard. He then added in a louder tone, “I don’t, actually. If I did, you wouldn’t understand the context of the events any more than you do now, if not less. I ah… “ He paused for a moment, then heaved out a sigh. “It would be best to start at the beginning, or close to it. I may have left a few things out of my official statement last time. I don’t know why, precisely, except that I thought it… It was strange enough as it was, wasn’t it?” 

“Your… last statement?” Martin couldn’t help asking. He was plainly bewildered, and something that tasted like dread was building up in his chest. He clutched at it, smiling with still more desperation. 

The man’s frown twisted at the corners before he lifted a hand and drew it down his face. “Right,” he said. “Right.” He closed his eyes briefly before he then clasped his hands on the table and straightened his back. Martin found himself unconsciously mirroring his posture as the other man cleared his throat. “Just-“ A sigh, followed by a sharp, “Just take notes, will you? I believe that will simplify matters.”

For whatever reason, or perhaps despite several very convincing reasons why he should do literally anything else, Martin found himself reaching for a notebook to do just that. Maybe he was compelled to, but it was just as likely that the very obvious fear lurking in the corners of that man’s mouth like a secret made him want to help. Even if he _was_ a murderer. 

“Right,” the man said again, and this time the impatience in his tone warred with something that might have been relief. “As I said, I came to give a statement here, to you, several months ago. You were the last person I spoke to before I walked straight out of this office and into… I don’t even know what!” His voice was rising again. Martin glanced up from his notebook to see grief, or something like it, in his expression before the man lifted a shaking hand to drag down his face for a second time. Greying, blue-black hair tumbled after from his messy ponytail. Something about that gave him pause, much more so the words that followed. “I need… I need you to _help me_ , the way you didn’t back then.”

Something about that triggered something in his brain, some hidden corner that he had forgotten existed. Light dawned on Martin’s face as a trickle of memories started to creep back in. He knew this man. Not well, but well enough all the same that he had to exert a mighty effort to stop himself from reaching out. “Jon?” 

“I told you,” he started to say exasperatedly from behind his hand, “it’s Jonathan, not J-“ There was a silence, one that stretched on for long seconds. Then Jonathan Sims lowered his hand, and Martin knew him. Knew him, just as he knew that he had gone straight to Elias after Jonathan’s disappearance to report him missing. He had been angry on Jonathan’s behalf, been terrified, and then when he had left that office, Martin had forgotten him. He had forgotten him so completely that up until this moment, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you that he had met anyone new that day at all. 

Guilt turned his expression into something other than it had been before, but Jonathan barely seemed to notice. He actually laughed. It was a rusty thing, as if he’d almost forgotten how, but still full to bursting with relief. “You remember me!” He said softly. “That’s…” He laughed again, more quietly, and uncurled a bit from the tight clench he'd kept around his middle. “That is something, isn’t it?”

“Jonathan,” Martin cut in urgently, “where did you go?”

Jonathan shook his head. “I can’t just… I’ll have to go back in order to go forward, as they say. And… do please keep taking notes. Please. I believe it will help.”

He waited while Martin picked up a pen, then longer while Martin put it down in order to press record on a tape recorder and read out, “Statement of Jonathan Sims, regarding a, ah, a death. Statement taken directly from subject on October the second, 2016.” He nodded at Jonathan, who was silent for some seconds. The only sound was the rasp of skin against skin as he rubbed his fingers together. 

“I left quite a bit out the last time, I do apologize. I didn't quite know if I could… Well. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the… disturbance in the library was hardly the last odd occurrence in my life since meeting Peter Lukas. After the events at the library but before I came in to give my statement, things got… rather strange. Small things at first, hardly noticeable on their own. I found myself forgetting to return important emails at work for instance, or… No,” he corrected himself, shaking his head. “I didn’t forget, I simply… couldn’t bring myself to care enough to respond to them. I was apathetic, in a way I never have been before. In a way that frightened me down to the core of my very being.”

“I don’t… _do_ apathy,” Jonathan said. “I have many faults, as my peers at work would have told you before… Hah. Just… before. But apathy is not numbered amongst them. But apathetic I well and truly was, more and more every day. And so the day came when I simply did not get out of bed in the morning, or the afternoon. When I realized how late I truly was, I rushed in. I was ready to give explanations, excuses, but no one… No one seemed to have noticed my absence at all until I told them about it, and then they just...” His mouth parted in what could have been a laugh if Martin hadn’t seen his expression, lips curved down at his hands in a parody of a smile. The motion was correct in all the particulars, but it felt wrong, disconnected from the rest of him. The way his eyes still looked shuttered as the windows of an abandoned house, lonely and dark with something that made Martin’s chest feel tight when he saw it. “I _watched_ them forget that I even stood there before them. The first few times I tried to catch their attention again, and every time there was that period of puzzlement as they attempted to recall who I was, just like with you.” Martin had been thinking that last part himself, but hearing it aloud still came hard. 

“I tried to convince myself that I was simply being over-sensitive,” Jonathan said with an odd, scornful look on his face that was clearly aimed at himself. “That lasted right up until I couldn’t summon up the energy to come in to work at all for three days at a shot, and… Nobody noticed. Not one person. I didn’t receive a single phone call or email. And when I did return, no one… no one recognized me. They had security escort me out of the building for trespassing,” he laughed softly, and shook his head, though Martin wasn’t sure what the gesture was aimed at. “That is what led me to you, last time. Knowing all of that, it should have been of little surprise to me that no one made a missing person’s report after my disappearance, or since. No one seems to notice my presence at all, in fact, much less my absence.” 

Jonathan’s mouth worked in another one of those pained smiles, and this time Martin couldn’t help reaching across the table to offer comfort. Jonathan looked at it with an expression best described as a mix of wonder and despair, but he did not reach out to take that hand. Martin thought to pull it back, but he left it there in that space between them. “What happened next?” He prompted gently, when it seemed that Jonathan had lost all train of thought in lieu of staring at Martin’s hand with that same expression on his face. 

Jonathan started, and drew in a sharp breath through his nose that was more of a pant. It emerged again as a sigh. “I… I don’t quite know. I know I wandered that place for a long time. It, it felt like months, if not longer.” Jon brought his own hand up to cover his shaking mouth with an indescribable noise. It wrenched deep in Martin’s chest, and it took everything he had not to come around the desk to touch him, to ground himself in the way he always sought out when anxiety made his heart shiver.

Finally, Jon continued, “I was back in the library. My library. But it- it wasn’t, anymore. It was just like the first time I was trapped in that place, if not worse for returning.” His mouth twisted. “You might remember I said that I went a little mad the first time? Returning to this twisted mockery of my familiar place of comfort and safety was… I think it broke something in me. I do. I won’t talk about what…” He drew in a shuddering breath. “What it did to me, but suffice to say that I was more than a little desperate for some sort of reprieve. Anything. As I said, there were no people there to spend even the most passive time around, so I spent a, a very long time trying to read at first. Checked book after book and… Most of them were blank, save for a few hastily scribbled words. ‘Help me,’ and, ‘I’m sorry,’ and ‘where are you?’” 

Jonathan swallowed again, and reached for the water bottle Martin held out wordlessly. He drank deeply from it, and passed the bottle from hand to hand afterwards. “This time, however, there was one very significant difference. The longer I spent in that place that was not a place, the more uh… diffuse everything became. Everything became… I don’t know, suggestions of themselves? Silhouettes and outlines that faded away to a blank white nothingness.”

Jonathan’s frown deepened, and he passed the bottle back and forth faster. “I don’t know what changed initially,” he said slowly, after a silence that must have gone on for at least ten seconds and contained more than one twist of Jonathan’s expression, “only that when my thoughts wandered to you, the last person who saw me, it became just that bit easier to find things I recognized. Landmarks, people.” His mouth twisted, and Martin wondered if he had been one of those shadow people, but was too afraid of the answer to ask. “And then… and then I passed out of that place. I-“ he seemed to struggle to find words, before sagging back into place. “I simply found myself back in London.”

“But how did you _do it_?” Martin pressed, leaning forward. Something in his tone made Jon glance at his face, then away. He shrugged. 

“I don’t… I don’t know. Or I don’t remember. All I know is that I was in one place, and then I wasn’t. That I found myself wandering out of fog that no one else could see, disconcerted and _aching._ I don’t know that I could even describe how it felt properly. Words fail to find the shape of it,” Jonathan said, hands lifting to curl and cup the air towards each other, before he let them fall in frustration. “The way a cold winter’s day will gnaw at your joints comes closest I think, but not enough.” He frowned, then shook his head. “Regardless, suffice it to say that I was lost in more than one way when I found myself in London proper again. I came stumbling out just outside a cafe. There was… a person there, sitting by themself beneath a tree with yellow leaves. I touched them without thinking of it, which was, is… that is odd for me, but I simply did it without thought. Put a hand just here, on their shoulder, and found myself digging my fingers in without having consciously made the decision to.”

He looked away for the first time in the conversation, frowning. When he looked back, Jonathan’s eyes were wet behind his glasses. “They dropped the phone they had just been texting on, and the look on their face… It was… glazed over and distant. As if they were a hundred miles away. I didn’t know what to do, I- I just stood there staring at them until I managed to ask them where I was. When they answered, it was only to jerk away and ask, ‘Why do you want to know?’ And when they pulled away from me, the suspicion of their fave easing as their eyes glazed over again, and- and drifted away. Like they had forgotten I was even there.”

“I should have felt… worse, that the first human interaction I’d had after weeks was suspicion, but when they gathered up their personal belongings and left, I-“ He covered his mouth with a hand that wanted to curl in on itself, but was shaking too much to manage it. “I didn’t feel as weak anymore. I felt more like myself, even if only by a bit.” He looked away at this point, but didn’t stop talking. “All of the interactions I had at this point were flavored like that, until I- I hadn’t wanted to examine what was going on too closely, but after long enough and after enough people reacted to me like that, I couldn’t deny it any longer. So I… tried to isolate myself. Ignore the compulsive need I had to seek out others after so long, push it out of my mind even as I felt myself growing weaker, more disorientated. I began losing time. Short snatches at first, a few minutes here, an hour there. Then, I lost a week. Two. I panicked, of course,” he said calmly, much calmer than Martin believed that he had any right to sound, “but that hardly did me any good. What is the purpose of fear but to propel you into action? This had the opposite effect. I froze. Tried to deny it was happening at all, which…” 

He fell silent for an achingly long time. Martin did not even attempt to interrupt this time, letting Jonathan gather his thoughts at his own pace. “When I lost time next after that, I had been… tired. So very exhausted, down to my bones. I thought at first that I must have fallen asleep standing up, because when I found my way back to myself again I felt, rejuvenated. More myself than I had felt in years, maybe. And for the barest gasp of an instant, I wasn’t afraid. Then… then, I looked down and saw the body.”

His mouth worked. “They were… I don’t know who they were, or how long they had been dead, but it was… I suppose any amount of time would have been long enough. They’d died from slit wrists. I saw the knife, it was just… lying there beside their hand in a vast pool of...” He swallowed hard, and when he spoke his voice was barely above a cracked whisper. “I think I must have… I must have been in shock, right? Why else would I just have just… stood there, unmoving, for what the sun through the windows told me had been hours? No one ever came, not on my account. I called emergency services multiple times, and each time the exact same operator took down my information with no change in tone, no surprise or annoyance at what could have easily seemed like a prank. Just that same kindness fading away before they went silent entirely. Before they hung up. This happened again, and again, and-“ Jonathan Sims drew in a shaking breath. “Eight times. I called eight times before I stopped, and then I… I don’t know why I didn’t leave, except that I wanted to know. Had to know. So I poked around a dead person’s apartment.”

“There was a mobile phone some feet away. I don’t know how I simply… _knew_ the code, the same way I knew the layout of that apartment as if I had been there for weeks. And maybe I had been.” Jonathan fell silent long enough for Martin’s frantic scribbling to catch up. Then he added, “There were over fifty missed calls, both work and personal. It looked like this person had distanced themselves from everyone, all at once. Said some… very nasty, accusatory things. Suspicious things. And then they stopped responding at all, though it… doesn’t mean that was the last day before…”

A second, for him to exhale. “It was only as I was leaving the building that I saw a neighbor finally come to investigate. Perhaps it was the smell, but surely they would have been aware of that long before I left…?” A shake of his head. “The police arrived remarkably quickly after that. I followed them throughout their investigation of the premises. Not one of them commented on my being there throughout, even when they spoke to each other about what had likely happened to…” Jonathan paused again for the briefest moment. This time, the expression that chased itself across his face was shame. “To the deceased. Suicide, or so they said. But it was _my fault,_ mister Blackwood. It has to have been. If I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t…”

Jonathan finally looked back at him, though Martin noted with that same sense of deja vu that Jonathan did not make eye contact. “That was late last night, or I believe it to have been. It was the first yesterday, but I- I did not come here through the usual methods.”

“You mean walking?” Martin prompted when Jon seemed to be in no hurry to continue.

“Oh. I- yes. I thought…” Here is where Jonathan paused and actually gave a single, short laugh. “If you would accuse me of thinking at all. I thought to experiment. I thought of you again, this office, and then I was passing through the library again, for… I’m not sure. It felt at least a week, but the date on your desk calendar says it is only a day since I left. I suppose you could have simply left it there and not bothered to change it, but you don't seem the type.”

Martin felt unreasonably bashful about being punctual, and squirmed in his seat. “Yes,” he said as quick as he could into that mild discomfort. “It’s the second, Jonathan. And… and I believe you.” He tried not to react too much to the naked relief he saw on Jonathan’s face, guessing that would not go over very well. “I’ve heard a few, um, a few things that are similar to what you’re saying. Or, or parts of it. No one has ever… He struggled with frustration for a moment before he extended his hand again. “No. The important thing is that you are here, and so am I. We’ll figure this out.” There was still so much uncertainty and not a little bit of fear, but he wanted, needed, to ground himself. To ground them both. He ached to comfort a man who, if taken at his word, needed it more than most.

And this time Jonathan did not take his hand, but he did place his own beside Martin’s, fingers drumming on the table. The pained attempt at a smile that Jonathan had given before seemed slightly less so now, enough that Martin found himself relaxing, too. “I don’t know if I believe that myself,” Jonathan said, “but… You do. And maybe that is good enough.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is always a reason to stay, and I am proud of you for staying with me this far.
> 
> A link to international suicide hotlines: http://www.suicide.org/international-suicide-hotlines.html


	3. Chapter 3

Martin felt strangely tired as he sat down behind his desk that morning. It was the sort of dragging weariness that settled into your bones after too many days doing too much work on too little sleep. It wasn’t just that he was physically tired, however. He felt listless and dull, like he was adrift in a fog. Even coming into work today had required an extra push (or five) to get him going. 

He gazed blearily at the pile of statements to be dictated, old interdepartmental papers, older lunch wrappers and tapes on his desk. Resignedly, he tugged over the closest item from his unofficial “Emergency: do now!” pile and began to work. 

Over the next hour and a half, the mountain of work slowly shifted to uncover a stack of tapes, all addressed to him and neatly numbered in what he recognized as his own handwriting.  _ Statement of Jonathan Sims numbers one through 13 _ , or what should have been. A number of tapes were missing from those orderly piles. And what’s more, he didn’t remember labeling these tapes, of recording them, or even who this Jonathan Sims person was. 

It was a bewildering sort of thing to spring on someone before his second cup of tea in the morning, so he turned around and went to make a cup. Then he made another, and three more which he offered to anyone he could find on his way back to his office until he finally stood before those unassuming stacks of plastic again. 

He eased himself into the old, creaking office chair he’d inherited from the previous archivist and stared, until finally he bent and scrubbed his hands through his hair. “What exactly are you expecting to happen, Martin?” He wondered aloud. “You’ve already been through the worst life can do, what’s one bit more?”

He reached out and then paused, his hand hovering over the tapes. His natural inclination was to take the very last tape he saw, number thirteen -he always had skipped ahead to the end in books, he was so worried about if the protagonists would be safe and okay and loved- and his hand curled before he set it back down. “In order, then,” he said. Again, he was talking as much to himself as the empty room, but sometimes it helped stave off the gnawing ache in his chest. 

He selected the very first tape and started playing it in the tape recorder. He heard his own voice first, which gave him something of a start. “Statement of Jon-“

“Jonathan,” cut in a voice he didn’t recognize, one that was stiff and laced through with the weary impatience of a substitute teacher going over the same material for the upteenth time. 

“Jonathan Sims,” he heard himself say, “regarding…”

“No one ever calls me Jon. I prefer Jonathan. It feels more proper. ‘Jon’ is overly familiar. I do not want or need that.”

His stomach lurched. He reached for the tape recorder with a shaking hand and traded the tape for  _ Statement of Jonathan Sims 2/13 _ and pressed play. “-need you to  _ help _ me, the way you didn’t back then.” Another lurch, as if he were riding one of the roller coasters he’d been peer pressured into riding when he was younger, all sudden, disorientating turns and drops. Swallowing hard, he held down the fast forward button until the squealing sound he’d almost managed to put out of his mind grew too loud to be ignored, then released it. “-felt, rejuvenated. More myself than I had felt in years, maybe. And for the barest gasp of an instant, I wasn’t afraid. Then… then, I looked down and saw the body.”

Dismay was growing into a quiet horror as his mind slowly shifted to make room for the shape of a man who was all angles and impatient words masking the fear that made Martin’s heart drop somewhere below the level of his knees. Jon. His name was Jonathan, he knew that, didn’t he? But where was he now, and why didn’t he remember making these other tapes with him? 

He switched out the tape for the next in the pile, fumbling and almost dropping them, his hands shook so much. Almost as soon as he hit play, the tape squealed, fading away only to be replaced by the steady, crackling hiss of static. 

“-ometimes… sometimes I think the cold that rushes over my bones has been as good to me as anything else in my life.” There came a chuckle, which the tape recorder picked up as a quiet, almost tired sound between bursts of static. “Sorry. That, that must sound as if I am trawling for sympathy. I am not. I just… want you to understand when I say that if it were only to effect myself… who would ever notice the difference, least of all me?”

“I would notice!” Martin heard himself say at once, though there was the trailing edge of uncertainty towards the end. 

“I have always been alone, Mr. Blackwood. I will be alone again as soon as I leave the room.” He laughed again, humorless and quiet and making Martin’s hands close tight against the urge to hug someone who wasn’t even there. “I may as well be one of your ghosts.” A silence fell, and Martin somehow knew what was going to be said next. Was he starting to remember, or was it just a familiarity with what he was talking about? “A presence you only notice when you’re made to. One that makes you feel uncomfortable. Sad, or angry, or even guilty. What reasonable person would want to be around such a person? No. Better to get rid of them as best you can, as fast as you can. That is what you do, isn’t it?”

“No!” Martin said at the same time as his recorded self. His cheeks were growing hot, and he scrubbed at his eyes as the recorded version of his own voice went on to say, “We don’t- we  _ help _ people, where we can. You aren’t a monster, Jonathan, we’ll help you!”

“Funny thing about monsters Mr. Blackwood-“

“You can call me Martin you know? I wouldn’t mind…”

“Monsters in these stories are at a safe remove, even for you. Like a ghost story told around a campfire. That’s what we’re doing here, isn’t it? Recording ghost stories for some future archivist to listen to and give a delighted shiver that they will never have to meet me. Deal with me. That’s what the best ghost stories are, aren’t they? A taste of danger to put a thrill in your blood. But there is always that knowledge of safety. That there is an end, and a box for that tape, that book, that person, to go back in again.”

Martin scrubbed a hand down his face to dash away the tears that blurred his vision and made it difficult to see as he ejected the tape. He grabbed one at random, thrust it in, and hit play. Only as the now familiar cracklings and whining started did he look away as the tears started. 

This time, the voices sounded a bit further away, a bit more muffled, as if a layer of clothes were in the way. “-of these days you’re going to tell me what keeps you coming back, Jon,” he heard himself say, and he could only stare, shocked out of his tears. Jon…? But he’d told Martin directly that he didn’t want to be called that. What had changed, before or during this tape?

“How do you know?” Came Jonathan’s response. He sounded… tired, still, but with the sort of drawled relaxation that came from being comfortable. Like sinking into a hot bath after a long day. “I am an inscrutable figure, aren’t I? Perhaps I will tuck this secret close to my chest for the rest of my days.”

Martin heard himself start to laugh, until it was cut off by a click. There was a moment of silence, then another click. Martin heard himself laughing again, this time with an edge of disbelief. “Seriously?” 

“Yes well, I, ah…”

“You seriously, honestly, wrote down a speech for how to break the news about this whole ‘I meet my friend Martin for the first time every single day, and oh by the way-“

“Yes, yes,” Jonathan said impatiently, but there a smile in his voice, too. What was going on? “We are all aware of how observant you are.”

“What else is there for me to do while you’re swanning around London? I listen. It’s easy, when nobody pays attention.”

“....I do not  _ swan. _ ”

_ Click _ , went the tape, and Martin exchanged it for another without looking, pressed play with his eyes almost glazed over with intense concentration. 

“Statement of Jonathan Sims regarding, ah, odd happenings. Statement recorded directly from the subject. Martin Blackwood recording, head archivist of the Magnus Institute.”

“You don’t have to do that every time, you realize,” came Jonathan’s voice. He sounded less strained than usual, more relaxed. Martin found himself wishing that he could see the expression on his face as he said it. Would he be smiling, or… Martin could almost reach the memory of Jonathan’s body language, what he did with his hands, but it slipped away from him as smoothly as a dream upon waking. 

“I know,” came Martin’s own voice then. He sounded a touch tired, but much more… flustered, might be the best word for it. He felt shades of it now, and touched a curled finger to his mouth as if to feel it again. “It just feels… comforting, I suppose? To have a routine. Something you know will reliably be waiting there for you every day. Not… not everything is like that, and it, it helps.”

“I think I understand,” Jonathan said slowly. There came a pause filled only with the sound of the tread of their feet over gravel, and then Jonathan added, “I never told you about my childhood, did I? Not in detail, anyway…”

“I-“

“That’s right,” Jonathan interrupted almost at once, and Martin could almost see the embarrassment on his face. Certainly heard it in his voice. “You don’t remember. Well… perhaps the best place to start would be to say I wasn’t the most… ordinary child. I barely spoke for years, and tended to avoid other children. This was easy, because they made efforts to avoid me, as well. Books came much easier. Always have.”

There came one of those pauses, shorter than the others. “Everything has its place in my childhood bedroom. Still does, if I am to be honest. Certain books went together. I couldn’t have explained it if there had been anyone to ask, but… They did. It was important that they were kept close, or I…” A pause, in which Jonathan must have gestured or made an expression, or maybe Martin himself had, and then Jonathan continued, “it sounds ridiculous to say it out loud, but it would bother me. Make me anxious, in a way. Does that make any sense?”

“Yeah,” Martin heard himself say quietly. “That makes a lot of sense. I used to pile up my toys like that. My um, my stuffed animals.” Martin could feel his cheeks grow warm even now, so it was no wonder that he had gone quiet during the recording, until he heard himself give a weak laugh. “You’re right, it does sound odd saying it aloud like that. But they’d get… I don’t know, lonely?”

“Odd...” Jonathan’s voice sounded odd. Martin found himself wishing for a second time that could see Jonathan’s face and whatever was hidden there as the pause drew on. “That’s a familiar word, isn’t it. One of the boundaries children draw that are as immutable as a high stone wall, or perhaps one of the signs lepers used to carry around their necks. Odd. Well… I was the weird one as a child. You start to define yourself by it, because it feels safer, better. A discomfort that becomes comfortable. Your own wall you can push higher and higher until that is all you might as well be to other people.”

“The... loneliness, I suppose is the best word for it, only got worse as I aged. I almost had myself convinced that I didn’t mind, of course. That I was superior to those who spent their time growing up into people who weren’t odd. Who weren’t alone.” The tape squealed, and Martin gave a start as whole sentences were swallowed up by the noise. When it at last faded until it could almost be orbited, Jonathan was partway through a completely different sentence. “-t was when I began leaving graffiti. Can you imagine, me? But… it does make sense, in a way. Graffiti has been used since ancient times as a rallying cry against the darkness. I was here. You will remember my name, my lines driven into rock and steel and history… Until history itself ends. Until then, we will make our marks, and I will make mine, in the hopes that someone, somewhere, will find them and…” The man’s voice cracked. “And remember my name.”

There was nothing but the crackle of static overlaid atop the soft whirr of the tape recorder for several long seconds, long enough that Martin almost hit fast forward. Then he heard a voice, soft and slow and sloping towards a sigh that he somehow knew was coming. “It's a fitting punishment, I suppose, for all those years of living alongside the world without being a part of it, that now…” There came that sigh, so breathless as so almost be swallowed up by the other, louder sounds. “Now that I try to reach out, my every attempt is… it isn’t pointless. I  _ want _ to try, because you… I just need to keep at it.” A shuddering breath, then another. “That’s all.”

There was more after that, but Martin nearly jumped out of his seat as the door to his office opened, revealing a slight, dark-skinned man with greying hair tied back in a braid. “I, ah… I would apologize for interrupting, Mr.mister Blackwood, but I do believe it is time for our daily cup of tea.” He gave a smile that was just as warming as Martin had thought it would be. It was crooked, and small, but it made his whole face softer. “Though you do insist upon calling them ‘strategy sessions.’” 

“You’re him,” Martin said slowly. “You’re-“

“Jonathan Sims, yes.”

“Tell me,” Martin said hurriedly, reaching out to grab hold of Jon’s hands as if he would vanish at any moment if he didn’t. Jon froze, going stiff with wide eyed tension that traveled down his spine in a shiver that brought his wing tipped shoes crowding closer together. Martin released him almost before he’d had time to fully take in what had happened, an apology already on his lips, but Jon held up a hand sharply. 

“We’ve already been over this, time and time again. And this time, just like every time, our attempts will end in failure.” As harsh as the words were and as tense his body language, Jon’s voice was painfully soft, sounding the way an open wound felt. His shoulders hunched towards the hands he still held cradled in front of him in the positions they had been left in. “I told you that I went mad once, in that place. What I didn’t say was that there is no clean and simple way to come back from that. I don’t know how to. Everything has shattered, and every time I try to pick up the pieces, there I find… you.”

Martin ached to reach out for Jon’s hands to offer some small comfort, but he held back, only placing them with reach. “Then we start with the pieces,” Martin said. 

“There is no fixing me!” Jonathan’s voice came out sharp with remembered pain, and Martin would have flinched an hour ago. As it was, he shook his head slowly. 

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant… your edges are jagged, just like mine. We just have to explore the new design they make. Let’s start with names, all right? You can call me Martin. If we’re going to be working together over tea, there’s no misters, no archivists. Just… me.”

Jonathan blinked rapidly, apparently having not expected this. “Jonathan,” he said, offering a hand to shake. Martin was just as surprised in turn, but he took it and gave it a shake. Jon didn’t pull his hand back right away. “Jonathan Sims. Or… well. I suppose you’ve earned the right to call me Jon by now. At least this time,” the man, Jon, said with something resembling a laugh in his voice that was more like a shaking exhale. “The next time we meet for the first time, I might be less forgiving.”

“Hopefully there won’t be too many more of those,” Martin said with an unsteady laugh. “Or if there are, that we make the most of them.”

Jon looked just to the left of Martin’s nose and smiled that lopsided smile again. He still hadn’t let go of Martin’s hand. “Coming from you, I almost believe it.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter comes at a very exciting time for this story! Along with the beginning of collaborating with the very talented author witchGender on a large part of this chapter, we have decided to make this a series, with each different story in the series focusing on different characters in this roleswap au. I hope you continue to enjoy Misfiled, and maybe consider giving the others a read as they appear online! 
> 
> Thank you, as always, for reading my (now our!) work, and once again, comments are always appreciated, they help immeasurably in helping to keep us going And remember, you are loved <333

“H-hullo, Mum,” Martin said quietly into his battered mobile. His old office chair squeaked as he turned away from his desk. Behind him, a tape recorder whined as he pinched between his brows with a sigh. His throat ached, like he’d been talking for hours, but how could he have been? Everything was just so muddled, and he found himself blurting out, “I’m sorry,” before she could say anything, then winced. “Sorry, sorry. I know you hate... sorry. But… Mum, I think I’m losing my mind,” he said in a voice that cracked and broke apart upon meeting the air. “There’s so many things that don’t- don’t line up anymore, and I just… I just needed to hear your voice.”

There was silence on the other end. Martin hunched around his phone, fingers curling around the protective case as if it could keep him afloat in a sea of uncertainty. “Mum? I-“

“We can’t keep doing this, Martin,” she said. Not snapped, not gritted out between clenched teeth. Said. In the same stern, narrowed-eyed tone he remembered so well, and it made him squeeze his eyes shut even though there was nobody there to see him. “I refuse to keep feeding into this determination you have to wear me down to my last nerve.”

“I’m not trying to-“

“This is the third time you’ve called me since this morning, every time wailing like it’s the end of the world. I’ve had it. Go have a lie down with your tea and leave the phone games to someone young enough to suit them.” She hung up before he had the chance to do more than open his mouth. He sat there afterwards, staring at his phone until the battery saver kicked in and locked the phone. 

He sat and he looked at his phone and he picked it up. He swiped over to the phone icon and as he did, he saw that the number of outgoing calls was seven, all but one to his mother. He became even more lightheaded when he tried to focus on the name beside that outgoing call, so he gave up, and he sat. 

He sat and he looked at his phone and then he called his mother. She didn’t answer, and he put his phone down. 

It must have been a slow morning, because time felt thick and viscous the way it did some days, as if you were half asleep and going about your day in a groggy daze. It felt like that, and nothing at all like it all at the same time. 

He sort of came back to himself at his desk, mouth open and looking down at his recorder. He pressed rewind and then play, the way he always did, as if there were any other choice in the world. “Statement of Jonathan Sims,” he heard his own voice say, “recorded by head archivist Martin Blackwood, regarding…” There was a shuffling of papers. “Memory issues? I think? Something in here about thinking you know people in a crowd… I feel that one… Okay, right.” There came the sound of himself clearing his throat. “My name is Jonathan Sims. Sometimes, you want to call me Jon, and sometimes I let you.”

The tape protested with a whine, then a screech, and he let go. Pressed play. “Sometimes,” he read along with his own voice, “you can see figures in the fog. People, or other, more sinister things. In the daylight as you’re waking up, it is a soft thing, made softer by a sense of security. But you have only to climb into your car and start it down the lonely roads you called familiar for the fog to show a different face…”

He pressed stop, and nearly tore the tape out. Looked aside at the neatly stacked piles beside his hand on the desk, and there in front of him was a neatly typed up statement he didn’t remember setting aside, but clearly he had. Who else would have done it? A frown twisted his mouth in a way he didn’t like, and he swiped a hand down his face with a sigh. At least he had a way forward now. He pulled the papers closer, fighting against the instant urge to skip ahead, as he always did. Always had, since childhood. Reassurance that everything turned out okay, even if the middle was dark and full of the sort of dread that made his mouth dry out. 

Pushing those thoughts away for now as he put in a fresh cassette tape and pressed record. “Statement of Elaine Brooks,” he read out slowly, “regarding the bookshop known as Pinhole Books in Morden. Recording by Martin Blackwood, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins.”

“I’ve always loved books, for as long as I can remember. I wasn’t the most out-spoken child, but I had a large vocabulary, because I read books well above my reading level. My therapist says it was probably an escape from my home life, what with Dad being such a heavy drinker and Mum being ill, but that’s not really important to the story.”

“I heard about Pinhole Books from an ex of mine, he’s an antique dealer and thought I’d want to look into the place for the sake of getting myself something nice for my birthday. He said it had a lot of out of print books, first editions, that sort of thing. It wasn’t easy to find, I’ll tell you that right off. No website, small sign, dingy front door. But I didn’t mind it too much, I mean, the business is supposedly kind of old, maybe they just never bothered to get on the technology train.”

“The inside of the shop was... weird. Not creepy, just off somehow. It was one of those buildings that’s small but narrow, so it feels like it can’t be that big, but it actually is. Loads and loads of bookshelves, and of course that lovely smell of old paper. But it smelled like something else too, and it hit me after a minute that it smelled like clove cigarettes. I thought that was odd, I haven’t seen anyone smoke a clove in ages. Eventually I found the front desk, though I’d really call it more of a back desk, since I had to go pretty deep into the building to find it. That’s where I found him.”

“He was younger than I expected. Early thirties, at most. He dressed like a guy I might’ve dated in high school, dyed black hair and shady black trench coat. I remember, his tattoo really stood out to me. His hair was long, but half of it was shaved to show the side of his head, and there was a huge spiderweb tattoo that started around his ear and went up into the shaved hairline. I feel like, if you shaved his head completely, the whole thing might be covered in webs. He had been reading something, but he looked up when he saw me, and smiled. That smile was the first thing that really unsettled me. It wasn’t just projection either, like I said, I’ve dated goth guys before, most of them are total sweethearts, if a bit over-emotional. But that smile seemed... almost hungry.”

“‘Hello there.’ he said, and his voice was just a little bit rough, a smoker’s voice. “Can I help you find anything?” I had been planning to ask if there was a poetry section, I hadn’t read a good poetry book in ages. But my words stuck in my throat, and after a second, I forgot them.”

“‘I’m not sure.’ I said, because his expression was expectant and I was oddly afraid of what might happen if I kept him waiting. He nodded, as if in understanding, like I’d just confessed something very solum that he was expressing sympathy for.”

“‘It’s often difficult to know what to look for, in a place like this.’ he mused, and I watched as he brought a silver lighter out of his pocket and used it to light a black clove cigarette. I don’t know why that didn’t strike me as odd; smoking indoors has been considered rude for decades, and it’s a bookshop, surely he should be more concerned for the safety of his wares? ‘I often find it easier to just... stumble into things.’ He gave me that smile again, and gestured with his cigarette off to one set of bookshelves. ‘Why don’t you try looking over there?’ he suggested. ’I just got some new books in, maybe you’ll find something that... speaks to you.’”

“I honestly wanted to leave, I didn’t like his attitude or the smell of his stupid cig. But for some reason, I did as he suggested. I started down a row, reading titles as I went. At first, nothing seemed unusual about the shelves themselves. All the books were at least fifty years old, and while they were organized well enough by genre, there was no rhyme or reason to the order the titles were put in, or languages being grouped together. I found myself squinting at shelf after shelf, trying to work out what order everything was in, and eventually realizing there wasn’t any real order. I remembered I wanted to try a poetry book, so I went searching for the poetry section. That’s when stuff started to go wrong.”

“As you probably know, most bookshops have little cards on top of some of the shelves, marking where different genre sections are. History section, fiction section, children’s section. This place had those, but, for some reason, they didn’t help at all with staying situated in the place. I had been certain the biography section was next to history, but a few minutes later I found it next to religion. The books on the shelves stopped making sense too. I’d notice a particular title or spine, but when I circled back to the section I knew it was in, it’d be gone. The poetry section didn’t seem to exist at all. I have a pretty decent sense of direction, mind you, and the shop can’t have been that big. I keep thinking it over in my head, trying to figure out how I could’ve gotten lost in such a small space. But I can’t connect the dots, for some reason. I couldn’t even orient myself by finding the exit or the front desk. Everything just looked like endless shelves of dusty old books, never the same book or bookcase twice.”

“I admit, I started to panic a little. I know that sounds a little silly, but it felt a lot like being lost in the supermarket as a child. Wandering seemingly endless rows of products, knowing your Mum is somewhere in the building but still feeling the mounting fear that maybe she’s not, and maybe you’ll be there forever, endlessly running in circles and crying. I got tempted to start pulling books off shelves and lay them on the ground like a trail of breadcrumbs, but I got scared that the books would disappear the second I turned a corner. I called out to see if the shopkeep or another customer would answer me, but there was nothing. My voice sounded kind of muffled, actually. Must’ve been all the paper. Or maybe it was the cobwebs. Have I mentioned the cobwebs? They were in every corner, old ones and new, with spiders and without. I’ve met people who think spiders deserve to live in whatever home they please, but even they clean out old empty webs. This just felt like laziness.”

“I lost track of time in that place. I know I probably wasn’t in there for more than a half hour or so, but it felt like much longer. Hours. The shop had no windows, so I couldn’t see if the light was changing outside, and my phone had died sometime during my wandering. At some point the panic overflowed, and I started running. I wasn’t even looking for something specific anymore, I just wanted to find something, anything, other than the endless bookshelves. Running didn’t help. Sometimes I turned so many corners, I was sure I must’ve gone in a circle, but still, nothing looked the same. I was just about to try climbing a bookcase and looking at the shop from above, when I saw the book.”

“It had a plain red cover, brighter than any of the other books around it, which is probably why it caught my eye. When I opened it, it was a first edition Polish publication of Dracula, by Bram Stoker. I read Polish, though I can’t speak it very well. I don’t know if you know this, but the original Polish edition of Dracula is actually kind of famous in book historian circles, because it has some drastically different plot points from the English original. Something about Polish censorship laws being more lax than English ones, in Stoker’s day. Regardless, I was excited to find it, and I decided the whole weird experience was worth it as long as I could afford that book. I acknowledge that must sound ridiculous, I’d spent a good half my day running around inside an impossible bookshop and yelling for help, but there was just something about that book. It made the endless bookshelves seem suddenly cozy and atmospheric, instead of oppressive. There was a nameplate on the inside, indicating who’d owned it previously, but I didn’t recognize the name. Something German, maybe? Leitner was the last name, I think. Felt fancy, even though I don’t know who it could’ve been.”

“Anyway, to my relief, I found the front desk just past a couple of bookshelves after I’d found Dracula. I have no clue how I missed it, it was right there. The shopkeep was still there, smoking another cigarette. I held the book out to him without saying anything, and after looking inside to see the title, he told me it was twenty pounds. I was shocked, I mean, I knew it must’ve been worth much more than that. Was this guy just an idiot, or was he pulling my leg? I hesitated as I looked for my wallet, but he was still smiling with that look of pleasant politeness, and hidden hunger. I didn’t ask why he’d given me such a low price, I just handed him the cash. I didn’t like the idea of this creep knowing my credit card number. He rang me up, with an ancient tin money box that had a lock with a key, and no attached computer. His receipt machine was ancient, and it must’ve been mostly out of ink, because my receipt was barely legible. He wrapped the book in brown paper, and handed it to me. As I took it, our fingers brushed.”

“You know that feeling of a spider crawling on you in the middle of the night, when you’re just on the verge of falling asleep? When you don’t really know what’s touching you, you just know it’s bad, and you need to get away from it? That’s what his skin felt like. Like just by touching me, he was being malicious, threatening my... something. Safety? Peace of mind? I flinched back, yanking the book out of his hand, and he laughed. It was the kind of laugh you hear out of someone who gets a joke that you don’t understand. I was genuinely afraid, now. I couldn’t imagine what the joke was, but I got the feeling it was on me.”

“‘Enjoy your book.’ he said, with the same kind politeness he’d had from the moment I met him. ‘I love to see books fall into the hands of people who’ll really connect with them.’”

“I didn’t say anything, just nodded jerkily and turned to get the hell out of there. It was probably just the way he acted, but I felt like he watched me the entire time I was winding my way out of the shop, even though he couldn’t possibly have seen me after I turned the first corner. His smell followed me too, clove smoke and dry old paper. It clung to the wrapping around my book, too. It felt oddly sticky, like I’d need to take a shower to get the smell off.”

“The good news is, I’m really enjoying the book, though I don’t recall the English version being quite so scary. This probably sounds ridiculous to you, but I’ve taken Helsing’s advice and hung garlic flowers around my windows. I just haven’t been able to shake the feeling these past couple of nights that there’s something hiding outside my window, where I can’t see it. I suppose that’s just a testimony to how good of an author Stoker was.”

“Statement ends. This one really concerns me for two reasons,” Martin rasped, teaching for his teacup. The tea had long since gone cold and shook hard enough in his hands that a few drops spattered against his vest, but he didn’t care. A steadying drink, then another, before he dared put it down again and continue. ”One is obviously that there’s a Leitner involved, and Tim tells me it’s too late to save the victim, seeing as she was found dead in her flat several days after giving this statement. The police report said she died of a heart attack, seemingly from being frightened, though by what is unclear. The other thing that concerns me is this shopkeep. It sounds like he’s willingly distributing Leitners to people. What for?” His hands were clenched so hard on the teacup that they’d gone white-knuckles with the pressure, but he hardly noticed. “Is he trying to get people killed? Is he working for someone? I’m going to have to request further research into Pinhole Books, I don’t think we can leave the business unchecked. It’s so creepy, it’s like he’s just sitting there, in that maze of books, waiting for someone to come in and... get caught up in things. End recording.”

Martin sat and he stared. He dragged a hand through hair that had fallen forward as he’d bent over the recording. When he lifted up his arm, there was a notepad covered with his own handwriting. It started neat, but got sloppier as it went on, the last barely legible as “Seek out Pinhole Books, source” smudge smudge, what could’ve been “dangerous” and “Leitners.”

He sat and he stared, and he suddenly wanted, more than anything, to hear a familiar voice. He didn’t know whose, and that made his gut twist up into knots with guilt. He didn’t really have anyone in his life though, did he? Who would want to hear him whine when there was so much more important things going on in their lives?

Who else could it have been, but his mum. 

He tapped onto her name in the contacts in his phone, and breathed out as it started to ring. “H-hullo, Mum,” he said quickly, too quickly. He winced. “Sorry, sorry…”

There came a knock on his door, and he put a hand over his phone with a whispered apology and glanced over as Sasha James stuck her head in. “Ah!” She whispered in that way that people had when they didn’t really to be misheard at all. “Sorry to interrupt Martin, but I just wanted to check in and see how you’re managing down here. You’re all by yourself here so much, and well...We’re all still settling into our new roles at the institute, aren’t we? Hard not to feel shaken when you’re suddenly the head archivist and your old co-worker is the head of the institute! Just… I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed and like there’s no one you can turn to.”

Martin’s chest gave a lurch. “That’s,” he gave a nervous laugh, curling his hand tighter around the phone like it was a lifeline to save him from treading too far into unsafe waters. “Thank you. Ma’am. Sir!”

Sasha laughed, a much richer sound than his own, and he found himself looking away for no reason he could name. “Just Sasha will do. Please do feel free to come up to see me whenever you need to, Martin. We’re friends, aren’t we? I’ll always be looking out for you.” Another smile, and she left before he had time to say anything more. The soft cloud of her hair was the last he saw of her before the door clicked shut, leaving him alone again. 

He lifted the phone back to his ear.  “Hello, Mum?” But there was no one there on the other side except a dial tone. He hung the phone back in it's cradle, and looked around at his desk. There  _ was _ so much left to do, with him barely started. 

He pulled over a tape, put it into the recorder, and pressed play. “Statement of Elaine Brooks,” he heard himself say, “regarding the bookshop known as Pinhole Books in Morden.”


	5. Chapter 5

Martin breathed in a hitched, uneven breath and let it out. His eyes were closed, his head lolled back on his shoulders. He frowned to himself as thoughts started to slowly sift to the forefront, and he realized that he felt warmth on the side of his face as if he were sitting in a sunbeam, and heard the chatter of people all around him. Uncertainty came next, along with a very unsettling awareness that wherever he was, he didn't remember going there. 

Martin gripped the metal rungs under his hands and pushed himself upright (and when had he sat himself down in a metal chair, he didn't own one like that) and reluctantly opened his eyes. 

He was sitting at an outside table at the cafe near his apartment. There was a man sitting across from him, drinking from a half-full glass of something brightly colored and debatably alcoholic. The man made an approximation of a smile at him, set down his glass, and folded his hands on the table. “Welcome back, Martin,” he said. His voice was soft, almost calming, but there was some strange quality to it that made Martin’s automatic answering smile freeze on his face. “You were drifting again. I hope you don't mind that I ordered appetizers in the meantime?”

Martin opened and shut his mouth. “Drifting?” He said weakly. He had an idea of what the man meant, but acknowledging that dreadful possibility that had been nagging at the edges of his consciousness made his stomach sink down and down and down. He reached out without thinking and grasped hold of a drink in front of him that he hadn't even consciously noticed. He raised it to his lips and drank it without tasting it. 

“You already know,” came the answer he'd been hoping against hope wasn't coming. “You've been losing time, forgetting things? Getting caught in loops, for lack of a better word? I am afraid that's my fault,” the man went on, “if you look at it from a certain perspective. Spending too much time around people like me seems to have that effect on a person.”

“I don't…? Remember coming here, let alone-”

“Meeting me?” The man shrugged. “That would be because of Jon, actually. That's _his_ speciality, although I am quite sure if you asked him he would not be so complimentary.”

Martin’s chest suddenly felt too tight, and he grasped at it with a shaking hand. “Jon?” He said, bewildered by far too many things all at once. “I don't know a Jon, at least… I don't think so. Do I?”

The man shrugged. Martin couldn't help but notice that his pale eyes, crinkled in a smile, were almost the same color as his beard. “I'll make sure to pass that on to him,” the man said cheerfully. “I'm sure he'll be interested to hear it.”

Martin recoiled slightly, his clutching hand tightening in his shirt until his knuckles went white. “Whatever you're doing, I don't want a part of it. You're-” Martin averted his gaze down to the appetizers that a politely smiling waitress was putting down between them. He felt like this man was laughing at him, or maybe this Jon person. Why would it matter that he didn't recognize the name, unless he was supposed to. And that thought made him strain a shaking breath in through gritted teeth. “You're using me, somehow. This is some kind of sick joke, isn't it?”

“That isn't a surprise though, is it? After all, you're quite used to being used, aren't you Martin?” The man didn't even have the good manners to look Martin in the face when he said it, and Martin let his breath out as a wordless scream. He jerked upright from the table, doing his best to ignore the stares he felt from every direction as he pointed at the man and his uncomfortably soothing smile. 

"You don't get to talk about me like that! You don't even _know_ me!”

“Oh but I do, Martin, perhaps better than you do yourself. Under other circumstances, you'd do quite well as my assistant. As it is, you've been quite the busy bee, and I would like nothing better to encourage that. You may not believe it-”

“I don't! I don't believe anything you say!”

“-but I really do have everyone’s best interests at heart. I'd like to see everyone develop into who they're meant to be, it's all quite touching if you think about it.”

Martin stared for a moment, struck wordless with disbelief. Then he thrust his hands down at his sides in clenched fists. “You really do like the sound of your own voice, don't you? Did you come here just to gloat about whatever it is you think you've done, or was there an actual point? Because I'll tell you right now, I'm not impressed.”

Salt and pepper eyebrows raised towards the man’s hairline. “Are you saying I wanted your company?”

“I'm saying you have five seconds to actually _talk sense_ before I-”

“Before you what, Martin? Turn around and leave, the way you always do?” The man sounded almost curious. 

“Excuse me,” a feminine voice cut in. They both turned to see the waitress and her strained smile and, behind her, the rest of the diners watching them with varying degrees of subtlety. “I must ask you both to calm down and finish your meal, or you'll have to leave.”

“I was just leaving,” Martin grit out, and started to turn on his heel. 

"Already?” The man’s smile was growing more infuriating by the second. “What a surprise. And I haven't even told you anything about Jonathan Sims. Aren't you simply burning with curiosity?”

Martin didn't turn back around. “No,” he said, and started back towards a flat that he was already wary of returning to. Who knew what he would find? 

***

Martin’s nerves jangled the whole way back to his flat. It felt like someone had just scraped nails up a chalkboard, without even giving him the benefit of having heard it happen. He knew he'd started off with an idea in mind, a face even, but by the time he was climbing the three flights of stairs that led to his place, it was becoming harder and harder to hold onto. All he had left was anger with nothing and nowhere to aim it at, and a lingering fear that he was going mad. 

The possibility of early onset dementia occurred to him, possibly not for the first time, and it was a terrifying one. What did he have, if not his mind? He had no one in his life who would even notice he was gone, once the Archives made the obligatory sympathetic noises as they ushered him quickly and quietly out of sight. 

Martin stood in front of his door for a long time. It was hard to say how long. He only stopped because somebody was coming down the hall from the other direction, and he was extremely conscious of what he must look like, standing motionless and breathing hard like he'd just run a marathon. So he unlocked his door and stepped inside, closing it behind him with his back. 

His flat was quiet, as it always was. He didn't have pets or a roommate, nothing besides Theodore, the wilted spider plant over by the balcony. “Sorry, Teddy,” he sighed, feeling that familiar flash of guilt at the obvious evidence that he hadn't watered the poor thing again. 

He paused on his way through the living room, frowning. Work he'd brought home with him was spread out across his coffee table, the way it always was. Today however, it almost looked like someone had straightened up behind him. Cassette tapes and written statements were neatly sorted into piles that you could've straightened rulers with. Beside them was a mug of tea, though the lack of steam told him that it had gone cold. He lifted it up, then put it back down right away with a sharp click. “Is anyone here?” He asked loudly, attempting to project some measure of confidence into his tone. 

No one answered him. 

Swallowing hard, Martin took another step into the apartment. “I'm warning you, I have a, uh, a knife! A big knife, sharp as anything! So you'd better watch out!” Again, no answer. He swept his eyes around as he stepped closer to the kitchen. As he did, he observed that that same someone must have watered Teddy, because the decorative plate he kept underneath the planter to catch water was brimming with it, and the soil was dark. 

Martin heaved out a breath he hadn't quite realized he had been holding, and relaxed, just a bit. There weren't exactly that many more places for someone to hide. His apartment wasn't that big, after all. All that was left was the bathroom, and his bedroom. Swallowing, Martin turned. Naturally, it was only to see that there was someone standing in the door to his bedroom. 

Within a few fractions of a second Martin half spun, grabbed the nearest object, and hefted it over his head with a strangled yell of the most intimidating thing he could think of, which was, regrettably, “Do you feel lucky?! Punk!”

“Ah! Sorry! Sorry!” The person yelped, throwing their forearms up to cover their face. “I was just- I was sleeping, and I, uh, I forgot that you don’t remember me as soon as you leave,” they -he, possibly?- said from behind their arms. After a moment they added, “I would really appreciate it on a personal level if you don't hit me with your plant.”

Martin slowly raised his eyes to see the bottom of Theodore’s planter just in time to be hit square in the forehead with a fat water droplet. “Sorry, Teddy,” he muttered. 

"Jonathan Sims,” he heard after a short pause, and Martin looked back in time to see a twitch of the mouth that was hard to decipher. “Jon. We, uh. I suppose you could call us partners, of a sort.” Looking at him, Jonathan -Jon- was on the short side, and rail thin, with long hair that was more grey than black tumbling down around wide eyes. Martin couldn't help but notice that Jon had on one of his jumpers over top of wrinkled dress clothes. “Oh, ah,” he said, picking at the jumper when he noticed the direction of Martin’s gaze. “Apologies. You seemed rather set on giving it to me, last time. Insistent, you could say.”

“Was I?” Martin asked, lowering Theodore and carefully setting him back on his plate on the windowsill. Something about this whole situation felt familiar is a way that should have been insuttoing, but wasn't. Then, “How often have we had a conversation like this?”

Jon shifted, and Martin had cause to notice that he had yet to fully meet his eyes. “Like this one? Both more and less than you'd expect. A lot of our meetings are spent summarizing up previous ones, if you haven't had the chance to read your notes. You've never threatened me with a houseplant before, however. That was new.”

Martin coughed, feeling his cheeks growing hot and tingly. “So’s meeting someone for the first time when it really isn't,” he replied. 

Jon glanced up at Martin’s face, then back down again hurriedly. “Yes, well. It's all part of the charm of my new existence,” he said ruefully. “Like a socially awkward Sisyphus, I must introduce myself again and again, only to be crushed by my own lack of situational awareness.”

That was not at all helping Martin’s flush, nor did the way Jon shifted, hugging one arm to himself. 

“That said,” Jon added with more than a bit of uncertainty in his tone, then trailed off. He must have caught Martin’s look though, because he straightened his hunched posture and bit his lower lip before he went on, “I realize how, uh, unorthodox this must seem.”

“You mean the part where you straightened up my living room and watered my plant while I was gone?”

“I also made your bed.” Jon winced right after saying that, and shifted again, blinking rapidly. “I mean. Uh. Yes. That.”

“There's worse ways to be reintroduced to someone I suppose,” Martin said slowly. He decided not to add that it was oddly endearing, especially the part where he was wearing Martin’s jumper. 

“I suppose I was… trying to keep busy while you were gone. I don't do very well without some sort of mental stimulation.”

“I wish _I_ got the urge to clean up when I get bored,” Martin said by way of trying to lighten the tension he could still see in Jon’s shoulders. He might not understand this situation very well, but he understood the role he could already feel himself slotting into with the ease of long familiarity. 

“Trust me, you don't.” A flash of a smile that was there and gone, like a half-caught glimpse of something beautiful that was gone when you turned your head. “Once I run out of practical methods of distraction, I move onto… less advisable ones, shall we say.”

That sounded familiar. “What else have you been up to, then?”

“Before falling asleep, you mean?” Jon gave a lopsided shrug and nodded his head in the direction of the tapes and notes in their orderly little piles. “I was compiling what information we have managed to collect on Pinhole Books.”

"On what now?”

“Pinhole Books,” Jon repeated without a hint of frustration as he sat himself down on the arm of Martin’s couch, drawing one leg up to cross atop the other. “You spoke of it several times during our last meeting, and it was cause for some concern for you. After doing additional research on my own time, it became quite concerning to me, as well.”

“What about it?” Martin found himself asking, and wondered again how many times he'd asked that. At least here, with Jon, he didn't find himself drawing himself up in preparation to be mocked the way he assumed he would have otherwise. Jon didn't seem the type to make fun of him for not understanding something, which was an unexpected but pleasant surprise. “What's so concerning about a book shop?”

“There is… something, about the man who runs it.” Jon pursed his lips, and Martin had to hurriedly look back down at the table and pretend to be fascinated by the way the cassette tapes were lined up to be precisely one inch away from the corner of the coffee table and everything else was spaced according to that. “It is hard to describe, save that I keep finding myself wishing to return. I haven't often had that feeling as of late, save for-” He cut himself off suddenly, frowning so deeply that Martin couldn't bring himself to ask what he'd been about to say. 

Jon shook his head with a sigh, and Martin instead found himself asking, “Why are you doing this? Helping me when I don't even remember you from day to day? What can you possibly get out of it?” Even he hadn't expected that to come out of his mouth, but now that it had, he desperately needed to know the answer. It was already next to impossible for him to make any sort of meaningful connection in his day-to-day life, so why would somebody like Jon, a mysterious, clearly very intelligent and poised person, want anything to do with him?

Jon went very still, and for a few seconds, Martin almost thought he wouldn't answer him at all. When he finally did, the words came out slow and stilted. “I suppose… I suppose it starts with knowing what it is to be lonely. I can- I can feel that you need someone, the way I-” He drew in a shuddering breath, and when he spoke again on the exhale it was so quiet that Martin had to strain to hear him. “The same way I do. And there's something to say for the fact that, as many times as you are introduced to this insanity, you keep trying. Many wouldn't.”

Martin was pretty sure ‘this insanity’ was code for Jon’s entire life at this point, but decided not to say so, which was at least partially because he was busy being too flustered to speak. Jon still wasn't making eye contact with him, but that was okay, because Martin was getting the impression that Jon communicated so much more without it. 

“Okay,” Martin said. 

“Okay?” Jonathan blinked at him with a frown. 

“Okay, I think we are partners. Let's go talk to this bookshop owner.”

“I'll warn you,” Jon said slowly, “based off of what information I've been able to gather from the statements you've brought me, this man is responsible for at least three deaths that we know about. He appears to have been deliberately selling some sort of evil books for an unknown purpose.”

“Leitners, you say? Well,” Martin said with another attempt at lightness, this time succeeding in earning himself a startled expression that was truly satisfying, “I gather that I've been in worse positions for worse reasons lately. At least this time it will be with a friend.”

Jon openly gaped at him, and for what felt like the first time, Martin crinkled his eyes at him in a smile. 


	6. Chapter 6

Martin sat, and he stared. There was a tape recorder in his hands, heavy and bulky and familiar while still being strange. Martin felt his face twist with a puzzled sort of frown, brows drawing down as the cogs and wheels in his head slowly started to turn. 

He sat and he stared and he frowned, worrying at his lower lip as bits and pieces of the recent past filtered through what almost felt like a wall of fog in his mind. He was Martin, and he was worried. 

He was Martin, and he was worried about Jonathan, Jon, the man with the slow, quiet smile and the quick recoil if you went to touch him. 

He was Martin, the head archivist of The Magnus Institute, and he was worried about what lay ahead for Jon. 

He hit play. 

“Statement of Maria Mikhailova, regarding an encounter with the owner of Pinhole Books, recorded by archival assistant Sasha James,” he heard Sasha read out crisply. She did get on him about articulation sometimes, he thought with a slightly delayed smile. “A note before I read that this statement was… I suppose the right word would be  _ degraded _ , wouldn't it? The pages are crumbling and covered with dust and old cobwebs, although if you go by the date, it's only a year or so old… Well. Anyway.”

Sasha cleared her throat again, and the image of a chubby, lively woman with clouds of tightly wound curls filled his head, where before it had been… not quite blank, but close to it. “It was my anniversary recently, and I was out shopping for presents. Admittedly, half of them were for me. I have a rule, see, that if I'm going to be buying presents, at least one thing has to be for me, to keep it fun and interesting and all that nonsense I use to justify my spending habits.”

“Anyway, I was looking for antique-y type stuff, old chests and other knickknacks, but after a while I wasn't having much luck, and my eye landed towards local bookstores. It always seems to. It was towards the end of the day that I found Pinhole Books. It looked like just the sort of place I like, quiet and out of the way and organized more like an eccentric collector’s library than an actual store. It even smelled right, if you know what I mean. Old paper. It's just… it just means home to me, more than my parents’ place ever did when I was growing up.”

“I wandered about. Of course I did. Eventually, I found who I imagine was the owner, or so I thought at the time. She was older, with tightly pulled back greying hair, maybe it used to be red? I remember looking at those coppery strands tucked into that severe bun and wondering if she wouldn't be pretty if the look on her face didn't look like you'd just squatted and took a big, steaming shit right in the middle of the floor. She was polite enough otherwise-”

“She?” Interrupted a quiet voice from his side, and Martin jerked, nearly dropping the tape recorder in his surprise as his hands flew up. 

“Ah! I- S-sorry,” that same person said as Martin clutched at his chest. 

_ “Christ!”  _ He gasped. “You're going to straight out kill me one of these days doing that, Jon…” The certainty that he'd had in his head of what and who he would see evaporated as he turned to see a man sitting beside him, just close enough that Martin could feel the couch vibrating along with the man’s leg, but far enough away that there wasn't so much a gap but a canyon between them. He was not a stranger, but Martin did not know him. He felt like he ought to -he knew the man’s name already, didn't he?- but as hard as he tried, it was yet one more thing that hung teasingly, frustratingly out of reach behind that wall of fog in his head. 

It was as he was opening his mouth to say more that he noticed that there was a woman sitting across from them, too. She had her chin cupped in a brown-skinned hand, and was wearing a ragged t-shirt that said WTG and a crooked smile. “You need a minute?” She asked him with a tone halfway between kind and knowing, but he was too busy being almost pathetically relieved that he wouldn't have to be panicky in front of yet another person to care. When he nodded, she braced her hands on her knees and pushed herself up. “I'll just be over in the kitchen loudly puttering around,” she said. “Ought to give you some amount of privacy, anyway.”

“That's Georgie,” the man named Jon explained belatedly as she and her arched eyebrows retreated into another room. The promising rattling of dishes and sounds of a sink being turned on immediately followed, and he relaxed by increments. Jon sounded self-conscious himself, and hadn't been looking at Martin when he spoke. Somehow, Martin didn't think that it meant Jon was lying or hiding something, it was just… reassuring. Maybe this person did it often?

Jon gestured with his chin towards the tape recorder that he'd almost forgotten he was holding. Martin hesitated for just a moment, visions of the many, many forms he'd had to sign about nondisclosure circling his brain before he shook his head, rewound it for a bit, and hit play again. 

“-was polite enough otherwise, I suppose,” he heard Sasha say in an affected tone that almost could have come across as Russian if you concentrated, “but even it was the impatient flavor of politeness that made it exceptionally clear that you were intruding in whatever she really wanted to be doing.”

“I almost made my excuses and left right then. I don't… do well with conflict or rudeness, and I was feeling distinctly uncomfortable at the idea of putting my back to this woman for whatever reason. I know how odd it must sound, but I felt like she was… I don't know, watching me for some kind of weakness to exploit. And don't I know I have enough of those. So I fidgeted for a while, letting my gaze just sort of fall wherever it would, the way anybody’s does in a bookshop, but then it stopped on the book.”

“It didn't particularly stand out, save that it looked much more worn than most of the other books on the crisscrossing shelving. It didn't even have a title. Just a woodcut on the cover of a trio of female dancers holding a severed head, and some kind of old library sticker on the inside. Now, I don't usually go in for horror, but anyone who knows me well would be able to tell you that murderous naked women on the front cover was all I needed to know in order to want it in my life, and they'd be right.”

“Still, while I was buying it I knew it was a mistake, but for the wrong reasons. ‘Mashunechka,’ I knew my wife Saanvi would be saying, ‘is this going to be just one more book on that pile by the bed you always say is judging you?’ To which I would usually answer with a laugh, or something like it, but this time… Something was different. I couldn't put it down, I remember that, but I don't remember what it was about, or even what language it was in.”

“What I do remember is the music. It was so soft at first, always on the edge of my hearing. It was pretty initially, but missing parts, the way music you half remember always seems to. And at first that's all I thought it was, just a song I couldn't get out, but it just got worse and worse with every day that passed. I got a bit worried for a while that maybe I was cracking up. All those late nights, you know? I even thought about checking myself into hospital once or twice, but after the first time I broke my toe it just… stopped seeming as important. You'd think it would be the opposite, but almost as soon as the pain hit the music came with it. It didn't stop hurting, but it… elevated it, the way pain becomes just another heightened sensation during sex, something you want or need. It was like that but entirely unlike it all at the same time in a way that's hard to describe. If you've never looked at your own flesh twisted in a way that's unnatural and smiled because it was beautiful… but I'm getting ahead of myself.”

Martin swallowed. His stomach felt heavy with a spreading chill, like he had swallowed a lump of snow. The tape player continued spinning, but he could no longer look at it, or at Jon, or at anything but his own hands. He should have felt more guilty that his first thought wasn't horrified, or truly uneasy, either, but he didn't, wasn't. No, his first thought was for himself. For Jon. What would this mean for them? 

Jon stirred beside him, but Martin answered the question he could somehow feel was coming before Jon had the chance to speak it aloud. “We’re going to be okay, Jon.” He didn't look up at him when he said it. “Every day is another step, right? We’ll manage. You have this far, right?”

He was answered with a stunned sort of surprise. He could already picture the look on Jon's face, with his salt-and-pepper brows going up and his mouth going slack. He'd already started to smother a laugh when he looked up, but when he did he found that whatever he'd been going to say had already flown away from him. Martin was left grasping uselessly for words and stammering his way into silence. 

“Martin…” Jon started to say, only to cut himself off with a strange noise when the sound of Georgie’s footsteps began returning from the kitchen. “Jon sighed, then offered Martin a strained sort of half smile. “Yes. Yes, we will be fine. Georgie, most of all. Who knows what she got up to during her last adventure out of doors. 

“Never you mind, Jonathan Sims,” Georgie sing-songed. “I was helping out a friend, that's all you need to know about it.”

Jonathan leaned conspiratorially near Martin. “You see,” he said in a playful tone that Martin didn't remember hearing before, but between that and Jon’s closeness his blood was racing, “whenever she says ‘helping out a friend' that usually seems to indicate either sleepovers in creepy abandoned locations or-”

A pillow sailed over from the couch to smack the side of a smiling Jon’s head. “Never you mind!”

Martin’s brow furrowed and he opened his mouth to ask a question that was interrupted by a loud, long-suffering sigh from Georgie. “He's just teasing, Martin. Jon has never been the sort to mind who I spend time with, unless it's to fuss over me.”

Now that she had gotten a good look at him though, Georgie’s eyebrows shot up. She made a curious noise, and stepped closer. Martin noted that Jon didn't step back the way he ordinarily may have done. Georgie didn't touch him, though, just stood with her arms crossed. “You know I try not to ask questions about your personal life, Jon, but-” 

“Is that a stuffed duckling?” Martin blurted out. He hadn't meant to interrupt the conversation, and had in fact wandered off to pretend to look around Georgie’s living room in his own attempt at affording privacy, but then he saw the duck. And the articles about corpses, and bottles neatly labeled as containing coffin nails. And the baby duck. 

Georgie’s eyebrows went up again when he spoke, but then she smiled. “Taxidermied, yes. Most of the things that stay in my house are dead.”

Martin absorbed this information for several long seconds. Then, as the thought percolated, he threw a look at Jon. “Jon, are you…?”

Jon actually stuttered and gave Martin a sideways glance that was reassuring even as it made him laugh. “I'm forgettable,” he huffed, “not dead. Really, Martin,” he added on a mutter, earning another, much more sheepish laugh. “A  _ ghost _ .”

Martin ducked his head down, but that familiar part of anxiety he'd expected at being made fun of failed to materialize. Instead, he found himself smiling at Georgie and Jon. “How  _ do _ you two know each other?” He found himself blurting out. That wasn't what he'd originally intended to say, but it was what came out. 

"Are you serious? Jon never told you?” Georgie raised her eyebrows at Jon, who shrugged. “Well, it's… It’s not so much a long story, as it is a story that needs to be told when there's a certain mood in the room, you know? It feels better, talking about things that are important when stress isn't hanging over your head. So, rain check until you two get back from wherever it is you're going?” Jonathan was already nodding his head with a look of intense relief on his face, and Martin couldn't really say otherwise now, could he? So he smiled and he nodded and off they went. 

At least, that was how he thought things had gone. Events were hazy to him. Had they really left that abruptly? It felt to him like they had, but every minor action was up for debate, now, and wasn't  _ that _ a reminder of old things he wished he could forget. 

Martin gnawed at his lower lip as they walked. Jon was quiet, seemingly consumed with his own thoughts. And with nothing left to occupy his mind or his time except for walking, Martin brought out the tape recorder from his pocket. He didn't recall bringing it, and he was starting to suspect as of late that would be the case even if his memory hadn't been playing tricks on him. Without looking at it, he pressed fast forward for several seconds before moving his finger to hit play. 

“-haven't seen my wife since that day,” he heard Sasha say, “but it's hard to bring myself to care. Isn't that strange? I might not’ve even noticed, except for that she always used to do the chores around the house, and the floors could really use a cleaning. Carpet smells awful when blood’s been soaking in that long. I’ve been looking into turnequits recently, did you know they sell them commercially now, in some first aid kits? Maybe I'll-”

Martin’s breathing was coming faster as he hit fast forward, then play. Discomfort almost had him getting light-headed, and it came as a relief when there came a familiar laugh from the machine, soft and almost awed. “-I mean, how often does the head of the institute James Wright personally visit your office to tell you about a promotion?” Sasha told the dank grey evening with an excitement he suddenly wished he was around to hear more often. “And not just any promotion, I mean- I was expecting the head archivist position, but he went on about needing someone he could trust in the 'seat of power’ while changes were being made. I had no idea he thought that much of me, but if it means these last few years of pounding the grindstone haven't been overlooked, I'm willing to grin along, you know? This is going to be so wonderful,” she said more softly. “For all of us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank for reading as far as you have, every day we spend together yet apart is appreciated <333
> 
> And for those who are interested in seeing this au's version of Gerry, my co-author witchGender has posted the first chapter in a new story starring him entitled Entangled! Just got the series button at the top of this story to be brought to the series page


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